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Perhaps it was always inside him and just exploded in an orgy of murder, four killings in 75 days, September to November 2010. Three of the victims were utter strangers, random targets picked off because Moore held seething bitterness toward the neighbourhoods where all the homicides occurred.

And he coveted gangsta notoriety, of course, as court heard during the three months of trial that resulted, Saturday, in Murder One convictions across the board. The aspiring rap artist slanged nihilism in his musical videos, boasted of street justice in the lyrics of his debut album Election Year.

I shudder at the stupidity that put an enemy — key prosecution witness, Kevin Williams, his former performance mentor — in the same courthouse cell with Moore at one point. Williams was pummelled within an inch of his life, allegedly by Moore, in a case that’s still before the courts.

Williams sidled up to that incident in the witness stand — apologizing to the jury for gaps in memory caused by head trauma — but was cut off before he could implicate the accused. Jurors were not to be told details about that beating, as they were left in the dark about so much else:

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That Moore had a long criminal record, more than 25 convictions, including robbery, drug and firearms-related offences.

That Moore was already serving a 12-year sentence for the August 2010 violent armed robbery of an Eglinton Ave. jewelry store — Williams his accomplice — the judge having stated he was convinced Moore was also responsible for an attempted murder four days previous to the heist. The victim testified that one of his friends had been in a fistfight with Moore’s younger brother. A few hours later, a car pulled up and the driver — identified by the witness as Moore — jumped out, yelling, “What happened to my brother?” before he began firing. “I am satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Moore was the person who shot (the victim),” the judge said of that shooting, though Moore was not tried for it.

The jury did hear, elliptically, that Moore’s older brother, Andre, was shot and killed in 2008 in circumstances eerily similar to the murder two years later of Courthney Facey and Mike James — two of Moore’s killing-spree victims — as they stood by their car in a laneway, across the street from the building where Moore had been blasted in the face with an AK-47 when he was 17. Andre Moore — a crack dealer also known as “Tweety,” affiliated with the west-end Bloods — had been the only suspect in the 2001 shooting and wounding of a Toronto cop, Antonio Macias, but was never charged, though he was found in possession of the weapon used a couple of months later.

At the 2011 trial for Andre Moore’s murder, Kenya Smith testified he was terrified of the “crazy” deceased and his brother; that Andre Moore had driven him from drug-selling turf in Scarborough and even tried to shoot him, but missed. The jury found Smith had shot Andre Moore in self-defence and acquitted him.

Another Moore brother, Jerome, was convicted in 2009 of stealing a car from a dealership and crashing it into a police cruiser. He’s serving a penitentiary sentence for carjacking.

Yet another Moore sibling, Taimone, survived being shot in the stomach as a 16-year-old outside a high school in 2009.

Can you follow all the interlocking circles of violence? What a family. Nature or nurture? Raised to mayhem or sucked into it, doomed by the maelstrom of guns and drugs that swirled around them?

Hyacinth Moore is the matriarch. She sat in the back of the courtroom during much of Mark Moore’s trial, keeping distance from families of the victims. On at least one occasion, she railed at reporters for acting, she claimed, as tools of the Crown, never giving her son the benefit of “innocent until proven guilty.” Just as she’d sat in the courtroom at Kenya Smith’s trial for killing her oldest son. Indeed, that’s where Hyacinth Moore was on the very day that police announced Mark Moore had been charged with four counts of first-degree murder.

Ms Moore, a single mother, was scathingly resentful of Smith’s acquittal. In a wiretapped phone conversation with Mark — “Mommy,” he calls her while in jail for firing a gun into the ceiling of a nightclub but not yet charged with the murders — she railed against the lawyers. “They are trying to make Kenya get away with murdering Tweety. And this lawyer talked about telling the judge he’s gonna put Kenya on the stand to say that Tweety sell drugs. Like, what kind of s--- is all that going on in the courthouse? . . . They’re trying to make this guy walk.”

Hyacinth Moore: One son dead, one son in prison for life with no chance of parole for 25 years, another son doing time and yet another shot. She raised quite the brood. And she has her own legal problems.

In October 2011 she was charged with conspiracy, being an accessory after the fact of murder, an accessory after a robbery, and obstructing police. In October 2013, the Crown withdrew the charge of accessory after the fact to murder.

The then-49-year-old Hyacinth allegedly assisted her son, Mark, in destroying evidence from the killing of Jahmeel Spence — his first victim — and the earlier jewelry store robbery. But she’d made news even before that. Two months prior, police had executed a search warrant at her McCowan Rd. apartment as part of Project Summit, the investigation into the four murders — Spence, Facey, James and Carl Cole — linked by ballistics. Same 9mm used, later recovered in an unrelated raid. (Another .45, also used on Cole, has never been found.)

Ms Moore told reporters that the half-dozen cops who “destroyed” her apartment had left behind a loaded shotgun, which she photographed lying on Mark’s bed. Never seen it before, she claimed. It was Hyacinth who called 911, asking: You forget something?

Police said they looked into Hyacinth Moore’s claim about the shotgun left behind and ruled the 911 call was made while police were still searching the apartment for firearms.

Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga, who headed Project Summit, was asked after Saturday’s verdict if he had any sympathy for the tragedies of Hyacinth Moore’s life.

“I could feel sympathy normally for a mother in those circumstances, where all four of her children are involved with the law to that extent. But in this case, considering her own involvement with the law, I don’t have much sympathy.

“I’ve looked for it. I just don’t have it.”

Clarification – June 8, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version to make clear that the Crown withdrew the charge of accessory after the fact to murder against Hyacinth Moore in October 2013.

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